A video content item may be represented by a sequence of frames. Each video frame may comprise a plurality of pixels. The size of the video frame may be referred to as the frame resolution. For example, a standard definition (SD) frame may comprise 720×480 pixels, while a full high definition (FullHD) frame may comprise 1920×1088 pixels. In certain implementations, a pixel may be represented by three elementary color space components (R, G, and B), each component being encoded by a plurality of bits (e.g., 8 bits for consumer applications or 12 bits for high-end applications). Thus, the data rate for a raw FullHD video signal at 30 frames per second may be equal to 1.5 Gbps which may be impractical for storage or transmission.
Video content items may be compressed by exploiting their inherent redundancy and characteristics of human vision. To facilitate interoperability between compression at the video producing source and decompression by a video consuming application, various video encoding standards have been developed, including, e.g., MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.261, H.263, and/or H.264.